One of the beautiful things about tabletop gaming is variety. A board game that matches your specific interests and preferred play style very likely exists. For example, if you like cooperative gameplay and you have a passion for Greek mythology, Ravensburger’s Horrified: Greek Monsters is for you. Structured around the same format as the game company’s first release in the Horrified series, Horrified: Universal Monsters, and this version is geared towards Greek legends and monsters. As we slide towards the release of Percy Jackson and the Olympians TV series, Horrified: Greek Monsters is an ideal game to get in the mood.
The premise is straightforward enough. You and your fellow players choose a hero to play. Each hero has a special ability, and one of the heroes is a Traveler—a crown-wearing pegasus. Yes, I absolutely chose to play the pegasus for obvious reasons. I also picked the pegasus because that particular hero has the most actions of the group. You’ll choose the monsters based on the difficulty level you desire. Horrified: Greek Monsters comes with Minotaur, Cerberus, Basilisk, Chimera, Medusa, and Siren. Working together, you and your fellow players have to stop the monsters before your horror level hits the max. You win or lose together. Along the way, you can guide legends such as Daedalus around the board to gain perks.
Horrified: Greek Monsters is relatively simple to set up and get into, even if you haven’t played another Horrified game. And if you have played Universal Monsters or American Monsters before, you’ll find it even easier to start. You can use your heroes’ actions to choose from a long list of possibilities, and you and your cohorts will have to determine the optimal strategy. Will you try to collect as many items as possible to meet the requirements necessary to stop the monster(s)? Or will you try to focus on guiding legends to their destination in order to acquire more perk cards that could be handy later? The multi-tasking aspect of this game, like so many, is both a satisfying challenge and a frustration. It can be hard to choose what to focus on, especially when the monsters are coming at you after every turn.
In playing (and losing) a two-player game, I lost sight of the primary strategy: keeping the horror level from climbing. Well, that and we didn’t focus on stopping the more challenging monster first. Your mileage may vary, but I think if we would have turned our attention to stopping Cerberus sooner—his defeat requires precise dice rolls that can be challenging to achieve—we could have been in a stronger place.
Even with losing to Cerberus, Horrified: Greek Monsters was an enjoyable romp of a game. Like its Horrified predecessors, the storytelling around the various monsters’ abilities connects well to what we know about their mythology. The monster miniatures are detailed and would be a blast to paint. Heroes have cardboard tokens, like with the other Horrified games, and I hope one day we’ll see minis offered for those characters as well. I need a miniature of the Traveler to paint.
Horrified: Greek Monsters is set to release on October 1.
